Friday, December 30, 2011

Our latest Directory updated in January includes basic contact information on active puppet slams. If you are an audience, find puppet slams in your area. If you are a slam curator, talk to other curators to find nearby acts that can tour. If you are a performer, use the Directory to find curators to pitch your show to.

Friday, December 23, 2011

If you are having an upcoming Puppet Slam or Cabaret, please contribute to our monthly Puppet Slam Calendar. Each month, we put out a calendar with basic information on Puppet Slams happening that month and also a brief look ahead into the year. Our calendar is sent via direct email to around 3,000 people (and growing). We also repost and retweet this information on social networks, blogs and through community distribution lists.

To collect information efficiently and create accurate copy for the month, we ask that you email your Submissions generally 1 week before the month of the event. We also ask that you update future events and let us know of any changes, postponements, or cancellations as soon as possible before the Submission Deadline. All Puppet Slams who have received a slam grant are required to send in Calendar Submissions.

Thursday, December 22, 2011

Warm
up your Winter Woes and kick off the New Year with a puppet slam or
cabaret! Whether you see 2012 as The End, or a new beginning, one thing
is certain: The Slampocalypse will not be televised! (unless of course
you know of an affordable documentary film crew with a soft spot for
performing objects)

Arizona's
quirkiest, edgiest puppeteers come together for some raunchy fun!
Independent performers do short pieces, which are usually funny and
always adult! Puppet Slam nights at the Great Arizona Puppet Theater are
for guests 18+.

Pepito
the Clown hosts performers from New Jersey, Brooklyn and Baltimore,
including marionettes by Princeton Puppet People, worm songs by Laure
Drogoul, a preview of Black Cherry’s new show, and captivating
performances by Eric Avery & the Ragdoll Engine Collective.

Dreary
as it is during Seattle's long Winter, we're drumming up a second
edition of The Fussy Cloud Puppet Slam. Gavin Cummins and Rachel
Jackson return along with Elizabeth Westermann, Jenelle Weidlich, Beau
Bond, and more!

Since
the day Blood from a Turnip began in February of 1997, BfaT, as the
salon is affectionately called, has offered professional puppeteers and
those new to the art form an opportunity to present big stories, in
miniature.

New
York’s only all-original puppet slam returns. This month’s theme, by
popular demand: The Beach Boys, featuring brand-new works of puppetry
& musical interpretations by some of New York’s most exciting
singer-songwriters!

Friday, December 2, 2011

At this point, most people are probably familiar with the Occupy movement. It started in September with Occupy Wall Street in New York City and has spread to hundreds of cities throughout the world. Arts and Culture committees are common in many of the occupation sites with art projects helping to build community, beautify spaces, enliven actions, and illustrate hopes and visions. And now PSN's favorite artform is also starting to make a regular appearance: puppets are increasingly joining the movement!

In this blog post I will be focusing on just one puppetry project, a cabaret, organized by Puppet Underground for Occupy K Street in Washington, DC. But puppetry is starting to blossom in other occupations, perhaps most notably in New York City with the Occupy Wall Street Puppetry Guild who formed in October and helped organize the Occupy Halloween parade. The Puppet Underground cabaret, “Occupy Kabaret Street”, was organized in coordination with local organizers and activists to support an action—the occupation of a vacant building—planned for November.The Context: On November 19th, DC activists identying themselves as Free Franklin occupied the Franklin School building, a publicly owned building in downtown DC that has been vacant for years. From 2002-2008 it housed a homeless shelter but that was shuttered as part of the trend in the last decade to cut homeless services and push shelters to remote areas on the fringes of the city.Enter the Activists: With national attention focused on the concerns highlighted by the Occupy camps, local activists and organizers decided to draw some of that attention toward the local issue of how public property is regularly misused and sold to private developers while there continues to be a severe shortage of affordable housing and homeless services. In recent years the city government has been trying to sell off the Franklin School building to private developers (one proposal was to turn it into a boutique hotel). It was an occupation in 2002 that originally pushed the city to open Franklin as a homeless shelter, so it seemed appropriate that another occupation would serve to highlight the potential public uses of the space.

The Cabaret:The goals of the cabaret were layered: to introduce new people to Occupy K Street, to educate Occupy K Street activists about social movement history in the area, to creatively provide the story (and local significance) of the Franklin School building, and to provide witnesses to its occupation. (Up until the end of the cabaret, no one had any idea the school had been re-occupied.)The cabaret was organized like a walking tour: sites related to social movement history were chosen and the shows were set up at each of those sites. Musicians played while the audience was led from one site to the next and activists presented the history of the site at each new location. The final location was in front of the Franklin School and hosted a show about the history of the building. At a dramatically timed moment toward the end of the show, a forty foot banner reading “Public Property Under Community Control” dropped from Franklin’s roof and the show ended with the announcement that Franklin was now occupied. A statement from the occupiers was read and an after-party commenced with pie-eating (OccuPie!) and music to support the activists inside the building.The Performances: The Bread and Puppet Theater performed two short shows. Local puppet group The Shadow Senators offered a tribute to Joe Hill. Music was provided by rock band Ugly Purple Sweater and Mexican folk music band Son Cosita Seria. Poetry was read by Zein ElAmine and a monologue was performed by political performance artist Quique Aviles. Puppet Underground ended the cabaret with the show about the history of Franklin School.

Follow Up:The Franklin School building occupation garnered significant local and national press attention (with several international stories published about it as well). It successfully put the issue of the loss of public property and cuts to homeless services back in the spotlight. Two days after the action a community meeting was held to discuss publicly what longtime community members would want to see happen with the Franklin building. Currently activists and artists are continuing to plan how to use their momentum to support affordable housing campaigns, to broaden public engagement in the issues, and to follow up with communities about their ideas for reclaiming and repurposing their vacant public property.Links:PBS News Hour’s interactive tour of the cabaret (capturing pictures, video, sounds and stories from the route):http://to.pbs.org/sf3D8iVideo of the banner drop and Free Franklin’s statement:http://freefranklindc.blogspot.com/Huffington Post article describing the arrests of the activists:http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/11/20/free-franklin-police-raid-protesters-arrested_n_1103509.html

Connect with a Puppet Slam online or in your area of the world! Choose from the 55 Puppet Slams we are now following and find out more in the Slam Profiles section of our website, www.PuppetSlam.com.

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The 24-Hour Puppet Show Challenge (Atlanta)

What makes the 24-Hour-Puppet Show Challenge so unique is this: all artists will be given one day’s notice of each slam’s theme, as well as cash to create their puppet. 24 hours later, Atlanta’s best puppeteers will perform skits, all on one theme, using their own (very recent) creations.

The APC is actively fostering artistic development of new short works of adult puppetry. Puppet making, audience participation, heckling, cheering, and even dancing is encouraged as well as audience performance with our Puppet-e-Oke musical interludes. Our future goal is to invite more local audience to attend and more out-of-town puppeteers to perform at APC.

Our Spaghetti Dinners act dually as a grassroots artists cabaret of puppetry, vaudeville, and good old cardboard enthusiasm while feeding the community all at a sliding scale rate. Eccentric, delicious, and the ultimate go-to for RIchmond’s experimental performance scene. All the Saints Theater Company began hosting these dinners to offer a radical gathering place for garlic, bread, community and puppet shows

The Austin Puppet Incident is a joint creation of Glass Half Full Theatre and Trouble Puppet Theatre Company to highlight short works of puppetry for adults. We encourage artists to participate in our reciprocal model, in which artists work with and for each other in a variety of pieces. We welcome local performers as well as visiting artists.

Band of Puppets Fest is an annual series featuring new work from selected puppetry artists working within a musical theme. Our festival this December 2011 will focus on the music of Michael Jackson. We challenge our artists to incorporate video into their performances, with the goal of uniting the aural landscape of music with the visual expression of puppetry.

These Pacific NW slams are a combination of live shows by a talented gaggle of local puppeteers and puppet short films from around the country. Frequently hosted by a 7-foot-tall amphibian, Mr. Toad, these slams have become a popular way for Portlanders to drink good beer, be entertained by talented performers and be a part of something unique.

Blood from a Turnip is a puppet salon that offers professional puppeteers and those new to the art form an opportunity to present big stories, in miniature. Co-curated and hosted by Vanessa Gilbert,David Higgins, and Boston-based video ventriloquist Evan O’Television, BfaT continues to redefine itself, but refuses to grow up.

In our ongoing effort to introduce artists and audiences alike to the most daring contemporary puppetry for adults, Bobbindoctrin is proud to present its Seventh Annual Puppet Festival! This year, Bobbindoctrin company members and local artists will present new live works of puppetry, along with short films from national and international puppetry artists, distributed by Heather Henson’s Handmade Puppet Dreams

Café Concret is a soirée of experimental puppetry, object theatre, and other media accompanied by a serving of food and live music in Montreal. In a city with a vibrant puppetry community, Café Concret is the only informal (and bilingual) event for short-form performance presented by a mix of emerging and established artists, often presenting works-in-progress in an interdisciplinary context

CalArts Puppet Cabaret is a biannual, interdisciplinary event curated by students from the Cotsen Center for Puppetry and the Arts. Small in number but large in talent and creativity, we puppetry students use puppetry as a means for bringing CalArts students from all disciplines together to share puppet experiments and animation sequences outside of class in a casual, fun atmosphere.

If you’re interested in irreverence, ridiculousness, and theatrical whimsy, the CoLAB puppet slam is for you. Collaborative Arts’ mission is to cultivate a community that is empowered to create inspired and inspiring art. The partnership between CoLAB and Mary Gragen Rogers has resulted in a dynamic slam that assists puppeteers in developing new work and thrills audiences throughout New Jersey.

Feed the Birds is a reoccurring multidisciplinary puppetry & performing objects cabaret in Toronto, Canada. With a focus on new works that aim to take artistic risks, we subscribe to the “cheap art” school of thought, and believe that no act is too small or absurd for our stage. Free grilled cheese with the show!

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways...When talented artists gather together to share their love - in this case, puppets - in a cabaret of short performances, you will be thrilled, touched, and thoroughly entertained. With all this (unconventional) love in the air, the scene will be set to woo your valentine as you never have before.

Blurring the line between audience and spectacle, The Full Moon Puppet Show provides puppeteers a space to develop experimental work and mentors emerging performers in their exploration of the puppetry arts.

Fussy Cloud aims to be an ongoing series of quality puppet shows for grownups featuring a selection of short works by puppeteers from the greater Seattle area (and beyond!). We hope to be quirky, edgy, hilarious, heartbreaking, gut-wrenching, beautiful, disturbing, profound, and profane. We intend to use Fussy Cloud to promote and support the puppetry community in the Pacific Northwest.

A newly-initiated monthly series of informal showings of works in progress. Primarily for artists working in the interdisciplinary medium of puppetry, the Soirees also welcome artists in other mediums who wish to get feedback from our puppeteer/visual artist community. Artists of many ages and levels of experience show and respond to work, in conversations facilitated by Great Small Works.

Spaghetti Dinners are thematic evenings presented in cabaret format, offering plates of home-made spaghetti and a healthy roster of puppetry and live music. Semi-nomadic, each is a unique, one-time-only event and designed to the scale of the venue, from grand spectacle in Judson Church’s vast sanctuary to intimate miniature work at One Arm Red’s 99-seat theater.

As part of the Indie Grits Festival, our puppet slam will celebrate Southern puppetry that is off the beaten path. Since its inception six years ago, the festival has been growing every year, expanding to include not just independently produced Southern films, but also an indie craft fair, local bands, and a slow food event featuring local chefs

King Friday, post-monarch, deposed and living in squalor beneath an old vaudeville house hath requestedeth new puppet works and puppet works-in-progress for an impromptu, after-hours, puppet-roadhouse show. Pieces shall be edgy, bawdy, humorous, elegant, or bizarre. Object theater, canastoria, and ventriloquism are likely candidates too. Come romp through the netherrealms of puppet and object theater with K.F. Adults only please.

Curated by puppet artists Julia Miller and Jessica Simon, Nasty Brutish & Short invites performers to create new work and risk sharing it with an audience for the first time. Puppet artists across all puppet forms present new shorts three times a year at Links Hall. All ticket sales are split among the performers.

The National Puppet Slam showcases the best slam pieces from across the country at the National Puppetry Festival. The pieces are nominated by the individual slams in the Puppet Slam Network. This evening is a showcase of the beauty, ingenuity, and hilarity of Puppet Slams, not for regular audiences, but us, the Puppeteers of America.

Pinocchio’s Slam takes place in a beautifully realized 18th century string marionette theater, and patterns itself on the traditional puppetry salons and cabarets of Europe, England, and Ireland. We hope it will help Pinocchio’s in its overall goal of becoming an artistic and intellectual hub for puppetry in Central Florida, drawing on the theater’s staff and Orlando artists.

The Puppet Co. Playhouse presents another Puppetry Playhouse Slam!, a showcase of short puppetry vignettes. Starring puppeteers from up and down the East Coast. Audiences will experience puppeteers performing edgy and provocative works that won't be seen in mainstream venues. Content ranges from the raunchy and risqué to the tender and tear-jerking of both rough and polished acts.

Hosted by Professor Willikers, the indestructible puppet, and featuring a variety of puppet artists, this slam event is in a cabaret format with live music. The 2012 event will feature puppeteers from San Francisco, , Calgary, and Portland as well as an array of local puppeteers.

The Puckin’ Fuppet Show is a night of uncensored puppetry drawing on the vast pool of puppeteer talent in Atlanta GA, as well as a welcoming atmosphere for newcomers to puppetry. Cash prizes are awarded for 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place as voted on by the audience.

PUNCH - NYC’s most consistent puppet slam, roams the city from venue to venue bringing you the widest array of short puppet theater pieces and theater spaces in the city! We are so excited about this and we hope you’ll join us for a great night of puppet mayhem, curated by Drama of Works!

The V4V Puppet Festival seeks short works of genius for its Puppet Art Attacks Slam. Short works should be between three to eight minutes. We seek short, condensed works for puppetry that are: brilliant, witty, tragic, funny, stunning, startling, ironic, exotic, political, lyrical, musical, beautiful, intellectual, experimental, wild, but always demonstrates genius in a matter of minutes!

Puppet Manualfesto celebrates short-form puppetry, community and food, embracing a multitude of performance aesthetics. If it involves puppetry, mask work or object theatre we want to see and share it with everyone else. Pay-what-you-can for dinner, stay for the show. A night filled with 2 to 10 minute gems of live puppetry, short film screenings between set-ups and dinner beforehand.

Sea Beast Puppet Company is proud to present Puppet Meltdown, one of the newest slams in the Chicago puppetry scene. Founded in 2011 the Puppet Meltdown makes its primary home at Gorilla Tango Theatre but stumbles around the city bringing puppetry to the fleece-hungry masses desperate to satisfy that rumbling in their tummies for the unusual and unexpected.

This showcase of works developed at the National Puppetry Conference, explores the infectious nature of puppets. Watch as artists redefine conventional notions of puppetry. From marionettes to Papier mache mayhem, puppeteers breed new strains of creativity. All profits from these performances will fund an Alumni Scholarship to attend the Eugene O'Neill National Puppetry Conference. Spread the Puppet Pandemic!

Puppet Playlist is a bi-monthly slam in Manhattan. For each Playlist, a musician is chosen (e.g. Tom Waits, David Bowie) and puppeteers create new pieces inspired by that person’s work. Between acts, musicians play interpretations of songs by the chosen artist. This mix of puppetry and music attracts a wide audience, many of whom have never attended a puppet slam.

South Florida’s Puppet Rampage explodes bi-annually in an uncensored blitzkrieg of puppet mayhem. While professional and novice puppeteers lob surrealism and satire, THE RAMPAGE gives special consideration to Sideshow Freaks, Burning Man Creatives and Asylum Escapees looking to perform.

The Puppet Showplace Slam is a much-loved Boston tradition that brings together amateurs, professionals, and emerging artists from across the region to showcase the finest in short-form puppetry arts. We aim to present a variety of puppetry styles and feature work that ranges from thought-provoking to mind-blowing.

Puppet Slamwich at Black Cherry Puppet Theater celebrates puppetry for adult audiences in all of its forms, from traditional to experimental, as well as related genres, such as vaudeville, cabaret, toy and object theater. Puppet Sandwich hopes to introduce audiences to a broad array of puppetry, welcoming emerging and established artists from the Mid-Atlantic Region and beyond.

Puppet Underground cabarets bring together local and touring artists for fun, community-building evenings of puppetry and performance. Our cabarets are usually politically relevant and we try to link our puppetry with local grassroots organizing efforts.

The LAGuild of Puppetry has hosted annual evenings of short shows as part of our Holiday Party. This year we are planning an Anti-Valentine’s Day Puppet Slam in February and another Halloween-themed one in October.

Banners & Cranks’ The Singing Picture Show is committed to presenting and promoting cantastoria as a contemporary puppet practice mixing music, object theater and traditional forms of picture performance. We seek to present the widest variety of puppetry that incorporates cantastoria traditions remaking them and transforming them into puppetry that sings its stories.

Lit only by torchlight (flashlights, not flames!) and held at a local funky laneway café, new and inspired puppet pieces are created according to different slam themes, popping up anywhere in the café space. Interactive audiences shine their torches to help light the piece. Curated by Lana Schwarcz and Nancy Black, and supported by UNIMA and St Ali.

Slamdango! is an evening of puppeteers throughout the Gulf Coast gathering to present new, short-form puppet and object theatre to an adult audience. In addition to providing a forum for puppeteers, we hope that it will reignite an audience interest and appreciation for puppetry geared toward adults.

The puppeteers are presented with an identical object that is the point of departure for the creation of a five minute piece that is presented on a tv dinner table inside a labyrinth of small spaces each of which fits one puppeteer and 6 members of the public. The public rotate and the puppeteers repeat.

Noches de Cabaret are presentations (generally 2 or 3 nights) of adult puppet short pieces within the Titeretada, our yearly celebration of World Puppetry Day. Individuals and groups are invited to create 5-8 minutes pieces; experimentation is encouraged and audience response is overwhelming. These cabaret nights have forged a path for adult puppetry here in Puerto Rico.

UConn Puppet Slams bring together working puppeteers from New England and New York with students from UConn’s famed Puppet Arts Program and other disciplines to present new and compelling puppet works. These performances take place in UConn’s School of Fine Arts Studio Theater and are free and open to the public.

This is a night of short form puppetry for adults, and promises to be a fun time had by all. We are very excited about the opportunity to share such a fun and transcendent art form with Asheville. Puppetry is not just for kids, it can be moving, hilarious, risque, heart breaking, taboo, thought provoking, and sincere to any audience.

In the icy and isolated city of Winnipeg, the Winnipeg Puppet Slam showcases innovative, eclectic and original short works of adult puppetry. The content can be political, philosophical, raunchy or just plain silly but we always guarantee audiences something they have never seen before.